ABSTRACT
Worker cooperatives overcome exploitative capitalist wage relationships by giving workers, as enterprise members, the right to claim new value created by their work effort. However, in doing so, they exclude stakeholders from decisions that directly affect their interests. Worker cooperatives thus create an apparent conundrum between the workers’ right to claim the new value they create and the stakeholders’ right to have a say over decisions that affect them. I draw on Marxian class analysis to provide a framework that foregrounds the production, appropriation, and distribution of new value, offering a novel institutional structure that resolves this conundrum. I use the framework to illustrate how various types of enterprise structures – stakeholder, worker-owned, worker self-managed, non-profit, and cooperative – handle the appropriation and distribution of new value. I then combine features of stakeholder and worker cooperative enterprises to define a new enterprise structure – the integrated collaborative enterprise – embedded in a governance structure like that of Mondragon, which includes multiple enterprises. I conclude by proposing a revision to the ICA principles for worker coops that seeks to highlight and move cooperative advocates and practitioners toward (i) the elimination of exploitation at the enterprise level and (ii) the development of supportive governance structures for multi-cooperative networks.
